The future of email marketing
01/07/2011
As a channel, email marketing is evolving and it needs marketers to evolve with it.
Consumers are savvy, they want, in fact, they demand their expectations to be met. Remember, email is an opt in channel - they can leave at any time. They expect relevant, personalised, timely emails of interest to them to be delivered by the brands they have chosen to be involved with. As marketers, we need to honour and respect their wishes. If not, they will move their loyalty to a competitive brand which services their needs and respects their wishes.
The simplest way to achieve this is to think of email marketing as you would any other channel and spend the appropriate time planning, strategising, personalising, creating and testing the ultimate marketing experience you can create based upon the lifecycle of your customer. The majority of email marketers are still using email to send ad hoc campaigns, with little thought as to where the customer is in regards to the sales cycle, little personalisation and no campaign automation.
Simply put, I see the future of email marketing to be this: we as marketers will begin to value email as a channel which delivers the highest ROI of any marketing channel (according to multiple sources) and we will endeavour to deliver emails of value to our databases which will entail testing, personalising and segmenting, using triggered approaches.
Having said all the above, it is important to note that the future of email marketing will not involve it being used as a standalone channel but rather as an essential part of the marketing mix which is used to communicate with the consumer at various touch points of their lifecycle.
An example of this future could be as follows: whilst on Facebook, Sophie sees an ad for BrandX and clicks on the ad. It takes her to BrandX's Facebook page where she signs up for email and mobile offers, thus creating an account with BrandX. An offer grabs her attention and she clicks through to the website and adds the item to the cart and purchases it.
An automated email is then sent with the details of her purchase as well as some suitable accessories based on her purchase and a reward card is sent in the mail to her. The following day she receives her reward card in the mail and is very pleasantly surprised at this so she finds the email and browses through the suggested accessories. Finding a pair of shoes she likes, she places them in her shopping cart but does not purchase them.
A day later her item arrives in the mail in the morning and in the afternoon, whilst out shopping she receives an automated shopping cart abandonment email coincidently offering her a 10% discount voucher on the brand of shoes she had put in the cart the day before.
Taking this voucher to her local BrandX shop she purchases the shoes and uses her rewards card to start earning her reward points.
From Sophie's perspective, BrandX supplied an efficient and convenient service and fantastic products, with the added bonus of being rewarded for her purchases. With the end result being that Sophie is now a loyal customer.
From BrandX's perspective, all communications were automated and they were able to create a personalised, one to one communication using multiple channels to achieve excellent results. Plus they have set the scene now for furthering the relationship via the loyalty card and more lifecycle multi-channel communications.
Of course, this is a simplified version of what could happen - there are many other channels which could be integrated in Sophie's Lifecycle such as direct mail, SMS, foursquare etc - but you get the picture. The main takeaway from this example is that this scenario is about Sophie and how her experience with BrandX was tailored to herself by herself.
Technology is on our side and by leveraging the tools we have at hand today (not to mention the tools which will be developed tomorrow), let's get to it and start making the future happen!
About Kath Pay
Kath Pay regularly publishes articles in both the UK and Australia and is frequently interviewed as an industry expert. She has spoken at various events, such as IDMF London, Inbox/Outbox and DMA events UK wide as well as being the Advanced Email Marketing Course Tutor at the IDM.
Currently Kath is Chair of the Events and Communications Hub of the UK DMA's Email Marketing Council and is Editor of both its newsletter and its blog.